


on the night we wrecked like a train

by pentaghastly



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Angst, F/M, JOPPER IS THRIVING BITCH, au in which the byers stay in hawkins, let joyce be happy, middle aged babies in love, nobody died or technically they did but nobody is staying dead, potentially vaguely happy ending?, st3 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-06
Updated: 2019-07-06
Packaged: 2020-06-22 06:11:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,537
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19661458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pentaghastly/pseuds/pentaghastly
Summary: She loves him, and then he’s gone.Jim Hopper isn’t the first man she loves.Still, Joyce thinks.Still, it feels like he might be the last.





	on the night we wrecked like a train

**Author's Note:**

> JIM HOPPER IS ALIVE I'LL PLANT THAT SEED AND SPEAK IT INTO EXISTENCE. 
> 
> just let joyce be happy holy fuck i swear to god she deserves so much better.

Jim Hopper is not, by any means, Joyce’s first love.

He’s an insecure, immature brat.

He storms into the place where she works (even though, sure, there’s not much work to do lately anyways, and the interruption is far from unwelcome) with absolutely no warning, ranting about Mike and Eleven or the useless boys on the force or _something_ , throwing his hands in the air, and Joyce has to speak to him like he’s thirteen years old.

He teases her, _prods_ her, with that ridiculous temper and that incessant need to always try and be right. He refuses her help, chastises her when she cares more than he thinks that she should, and has to force his apologies through clenched teeth.

He’s sloppy. He’s a _mess_. He’s a drunk, she knows that, but he’s not the kind of drunk that Lonnie had been – she knows that he means well, and he’s always kind even when he’s acting like an angry child, and even though he tries to act like he doesn’t have any idea what he’s doing as a parent half of the time she knows that he’s a far better father than her piece of shit ex-husband could ever pretend to be.

She wouldn’t have traded Will and Jonathan for anything, but she knows – she knows that Hopper would have been a really, really good dad. That he _was_ a good dad. That he _is_.

He’s always, _always_ , waiting to die. 

He’s not the first man she loves.

But – 

God damn it.

She does, for some unknown reason, love him.

.

She loves him, and then he’s gone.

Jim Hopper isn’t the first man she loves.

Still, Joyce thinks. 

Still, it feels like he might be the last. 

.

Hawkins is cold, and it’s empty, and she sees him everywhere she goes.

There’s the alley they’d sneak off to in high school, where they’d smoke cigarettes and flirt and act like they weren’t seconds away from tearing each other’s clothes off.

There’s the police station. Enzo’s. There’s _Eleven_ , and she may have only been Hopp’s daughter for half a year but God, if Joyce hadn’t known better she really might have thought that the girl had his blood coursing through her veins.

Dark hair. Those eyes, wise and all-knowing but somehow joyful all at once, cut out from a magazine and pasted onto her face. She’s seen more than any child ever should have, _lost_ more, and Joyce only wishes that she had been able to be there for the poor girl from the very beginning. That she’d never had to know a single day of being completely and entirely alone. 

And she’s so God damn tired of mourning, of contemplating losses and _what could have been_ , of having to pretend as though she’s okay and it’s fine that one of the only people in the world that she could trust is gone, without her, and they don’t even have a fucking body to bury and mourn.

This is different than it had been after Bob. Bob had been kind and gentle, and he hadn’t deserved all of the shit she had dragged him through – and God, she’s tried to keep him out of it as much as she could.

Bob had died because of her.

Hopper…Jim had died _for_ her. For all of them.

Hawkins rips the air from her lungs.

 _Still_.

Still, it’s for her sons, and it’s for her daughter (Jim’s daughter, _their_ daughter), and it’s for all of them that Joyce decides to stay.

Because one day she peeks through the crack in the door of El’s bedroom – always three inches – and she sees the way that she’s looking at Mike, the way that he’s looking at her. They’re so young, and they’ve seen so much, and Joyce knows the two kids well enough to know what it is that’s written all over their faces.

What a gift, she thinks, to be looked at with so much adoration.

What a gift, to not have to worry about having it ripped away from you.

In the evenings she sits on the couch with Eleven and Will curled up on either side, watching _Cheers_ , laughing at every cue, and if she looks out of the corner of her eye she can pretend that Jim is in the armchair smiling at them, gentle, _fond_.

What a gift, she thinks, to have a family. 

To be loved.

.

She places a photo of him on her bedside table, one that Jonathan had taken in the summer before…

Before.

He’s fresh from work, and his face is stern and severe but Joyce just knows – she _knows_ that he’s trying not to smile, that he’s putting on a show like he always did. She can’t remember where the picture was taken, but she knows what she had been saying to him: 

She’d been teasing him to try and get him to stop looking so serious, complimenting his moustache and teasing him about being a man in uniform, and…

And Joyce knows – 

She knows that she’d loved him, then.

She looks at the picture, and she _aches_. 

.

One time, back when they were in high school, the two of them had come somewhere near.

Close.

They were drunk and stupid, and Joyce and Lonny had just called it quits for what, the fifteenth time? And they’d split a joint in the park one night, when it was just the two of them, when the rest of the world seemed to disappear every time Hopp offered up one of his sweet, genuine laughs.

She’d wanted to kiss him, when it’d been him and her and she was just high enough to forget about all the other bullshit going on in her life.

“Jim Hopper,” she’d said, and he’s flashed that ridiculously cute, crooked grin in her direction, “When are you going to ask me on a proper date?”

(She’d been a lot more reckless, then.

Or – she still is now, but in different ways. Or she’d lost it, until her son had gone missing and she’d stormed into Jim’s office in a panicked, half-insane, anxious haze, and he’d looked at her like she was out of her mind.

It’s a different kind of reckless.

Joyce thinks she might miss it, just a bit.)

He’d chuckled, quiet and soft, and she’d felt delightfully off-balance. Only Jim fucking Hopper could make her feel as though the world was tilting on its axis with a half-smile and an almost-laugh.

“What makes you think I want to ask you on a date?” 

She’d given him a _look_ , the look that let him know she saw through all of his bullshit, the look that let him know he couldn’t talk to her like he talked to all the other girls. And maybe she’s fooling herself, trying to make her think that she’s something other than what she is. That she’s – 

Different.

Special.

Someone he’d want to – 

“I’m playing something called the long game, Joyce,” he’d said, and he’d nudged her gently, just once, just enough to make sure that the feeling of his touch lingered. “Taking my sweet time. Can’t rush something as special as what we have, sweetheart.” 

He was teasing, she was sure.

But still…

“Better hurry up, Hopp,” she’d said, nudging him right back, “or we’ll both be dead by the time you actually get around to it.” 

.

Except, as it turns out, they’re not.

It’s just him.

It’s just her, alone, with a son suffering through a trauma she can’t imagine and a daughter who’s lost every parental figure she’s ever had and a town that feels too small, too suffocating, too _dead_.

She goes to Enzo’s and orders for two.

.

Will has dozed off on the couch by ten, Eleven falling asleep not long after, and Joyce is about to carry her to bed when the girl wraps her hand around her wrist.

Such serious eyes, Joyce thinks, for a girl so young.

So much _sadness_. 

God, and she looks so much like – 

“He loves you,” she says, voice thick with sleep and still sounding so much older than she is, so much older than she should have to be. “So much.”

“Sweetheart,” she says, kneeling down so she can get to her daughter’s level – so she can look into those eyes, so somber, so _wise_ , and press a hand to her cheek, “Sweetheart, I know he did. He loved all of us so much, you especially, and that’s why we have to try and be happy without him.” 

“No.” Eleven shakes her head. 

Joyce frowns. “No?” 

“Loves,” Eleven repeats, half-conscious and somehow still sounding confident in her words. “ _Loves_.”

And she looks so serious, her daughter – _their_ daughter, and she looks so sure, and even with a mind half-foggy from sleep and wine…even then, Joyce knows that she’s not imagining things when she suddenly starts to feel as though she can breathe again.

“Loves,” she repeats, firm, solid, present-tense. “He loves _us_ ,” she says, “and we’re going to bring him back.” 

.

Jim Hopper isn’t the first man that Joyce has ever loved.

But, God damn it –

If she has anything to say about it, he’s going to be the last.


End file.
